English Dub Review: Sword Art Online: Alicization – War of Underworld “New World”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Rinko alerts Kirito that Alice has gone missing, though she soon shows up on his doorstep…through delivery. After getting settled in, she berates Kirito for facing Gabriel on his own, but Kirito tells her that he sees her as his hope for a new world, presumably for artificial intelligence on Earth. Alice ends up staying the night with Kirito and his family, where he explains somewhat of where he’s been to them and says he plans on working at Rath when he graduates. Later that night, Alice tells him about a coded message she received electronically which turns out to be an IP address where the Underworld now resides. So Alice, Kirito, and Asuna upload to the new IP address, only to find out they’re in the middle of space. To their further shock, a giant monster suddenly appears, following two jet planes piloted by Ronye and Tiese, who are now Integrity PILOTS. Alice, Kirito, and Asuna use their abilities to destroy the monster and are greeted by the pilots. We are told that Kirito and his harem will next face their final challenge, the “Inter-Intelligence War”, but that is for another time. The end.

OUR TAKE
Sword Art Online: Aliciziation and its subsequent War of Underworld finally come to a close with a surprisingly low tempo epilogue. With all of the fighting wrapped up in the previous weeks and last episode being about setting things up for the future, this centered mainly on settling things with Alice and the Underworld to give everything a good send off. And in that regard, it more or less does its job, even if it could have been a lot stronger a finish, but then I’ll take that over some of the other finales we’ve gotten from this series in the past. It’s most definitely a step up from the final battles with Administrator or the end of the Fairy Dance arc, though that’s not saying much. And it doesn’t seem like Kirito comes out of this changing much at all, or at least not in any significant way, so what it comes down to is Alice herself.

Like all the denouements of other new character centric arcs, Alice comes out of this given new purpose by her new love for Kirito, or at least using that as inspiration to find a new purpose. Suguha ended her arc somewhat overcoming her incest urges, Sinon learned to face her fears head on, and now Alice finds herself in a whole world’s worth of possibilities to explore. It’s a shame then that we don’t really find out what she plans to do with this new life, aside from continue to attend conferences and parties celebrating her existence as a non-organic life form. Last episode painted a bit of a picture regarding having AI becoming more integrated with regular society, though aside from knowing that they wouldn’t simply be doing factory work, we also don’t quite know what that means either. Alice is essentially her own person and it’s great that she’s ushering in this new age for both her people and humanity, but I guess I’d feel more optimistic about the future she’s bringing in if we got a better sense of where that was going.

Finally, the decision to end the season within the new Underworld was a good idea, but I have to admit I’m pretty disappointed we don’t get to see anything beyond what’s in orbit. Considering it’s been the core of the events in this entire 47 episode arc, you’d think we’d be able to end the story on how this civilization has advanced both culturally AND technologically. We get the latter to a small extent, seeing Ronye and Tiese have apparently become immortal knights who survived these past few centuries and now right jets through space instead of dragons, but very little beyond that. It’s not like this is the last we’ll see of the Underworld, as some future volumes go into some of the time Kirito and Asuna spent there, but who knows when we’ll be seeing that animated. But I think I’ll save my nitpicks this time since the story is finally over for the time being. Plus, I can go into bigger detail on everything next week with the Season Review, which has been a long time coming.